Lemme preface this post by saying that I am tired of writing my excuses reasons for not writing, so I’ll just jump right in.
Anyhoo, I swear that I cannot make this up!
I am the proud owner of 2 mobility scooters, Optimus Prime and (the newly acquired) Max. I use both of them and they each serve a purpose altho recently I discovered that Max, while a nifty lil thing, is not the most comfortable for sitting for any length of time beyond getting where I need to go, and I definitely cannot stand on him. I had to go to Jamaica at the end of September and wouldn’t you know it, I couldn’t take either. Well, Optimus was in the shop and Max is just not comfortable or “party” friendly enuf, so I really did not want to take him. So…i had to rent a scooter – UGH! Luckily tho, the shop that was handling Optimus has scooters for rent, so I got one of theirs (“unfortunately”, they only had 4 wheeled scooters which didn’t make me happy, but I got over that fast). Got it the day before I left Atlanta and we were off.
Once I landed in JA, we had to take a shuttle bus to the hotel that was 2 hours away. I had already spoken to the wedding coordinator to ensure that there would be space for me and as it turns out, it was one of the big, coach busses so I was all set. They loaded the scooter in the luggage compartment and once again…we were off! 2 hours later, the bus pulled up outside the resort, the scooter was unloaded, i jumped on, turned the key and i heard a long beep. “No worries.” I thought, “like it’s in manual mode.” I looked at the switch and realised that it in fact, was NOT in manual mode. “hmmmmm”. It was at that point, that it occurred to me that I wasn’t hearing the “something’s wrong” alert; I was actually hearing the horn. It sounded like the horn was constantly being depressed and when I looked, the actual horn button was gone – I guess it had broken off in the luggage compartment of the bus. Ah shit! this had actually happened a couple of months ago with Optimus and the only option I had was to take him in to the same shop where he was at the moment. Great! I was in Jamaica! no scooter repair anywhere!!
For the next 4 days, EVERYONE knew when I was approaching!!! I’ll bet you thought that the thing couldna been that loud. Well, you’d be wrong…shit was loud and there wasn’t a damn thing that I could do about it. Noise pollution at its finest…the only time it wasn’t blaring was when the switch was off, and I did that as much as I could, but I still had to get around. Sigh! There is some good news, I didn’t get any complaints or incredulous stares until the last night, but by then miss h’A and I were over it and we didn’t care that the woman was most annoyed, had her fingers in her ears and kept saying/shouting something to us. What was funny was that for at least 45 minutes after I got home and parked the thing, I was still hearing the beeeeeeeeeeeeep in my head. A few other friends could have sworn that they heard me in the various airports where they were connecting to get back. The other good news? Bill and John at the repair shop didn’t charge me for the rental or the broken horn – I couldn’t beat that with a bat! I’ll take the wins whenever I can 🙂
Be back soon…